Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby - Parallel between Jesus of...

The Great Gatsby: Parallel between Jesus of Nazareth and Jay Gatsby In his critical essay, â€Å"The Mystery of Ungodliness†, Bryce J. Christensen writes about the parallel that F. Scott Fitzgerald creates between Jay Gatsby and Jesus of Nazareth from the New Testament of the Christian Bible. Christensen explains that Fitzgerald once wrote a letter to his friend, John Jamieson, explaining that he was going to write the story of Jay Gatsby’s youth, but he did not because he wanted to maintain the element of mystery that goes along with the novel. Christensen parallels this to the absence of any detail about the childhood and adolescence of Jesus in the New Testament. Other parallels that Christensen describes include the description of†¦show more content†¦The phrase, â€Å"son of God†, is the tifle given to Jesus of Nazareth, a man who was, indeed, â€Å"about His Father’s business†. Also, Carraway describes Gatsby’s â€Å"Platonic conception of himself,† meaning his own creation of an ideal s elf or a perfect self, while Jesus was recorded to be a perfect creation. Another parallel recorded by Christensen is the description of the moments before Gatsby’s death. In this part of the novel, Gatsby struggles as he carries his float to the pool upon which he is killed. Similarly, Jesus is depicted in a struggle to carry his cross to the mount in Golgotha, upon which He was crucified. After discussing these parallels, Christensen proposes that Fitzgerald’s parallel to Jesus is actually at odds with Christian truths. As evidence, he introduces a work by a man named Ernest Renan, whom Fitzgerald is recorded to have great admiration for. Renan’s work, titled The Life of Jesus, depicts a man that Christensen believes Jay Gatsby was modeled after. This man was â€Å"faithful to his self-created dream but scornful of the factual truth that finally crushes him and his dream,† (157). Christensen argues that Fitzgerald’s Gastby is like Renan’s Jesus in that he is self-created and that his attempted to destroy the gap between his ideal self and his real self only seems to prove that he cannot escape